Caneel Joyce, PhD 09

Assistant Professor
London School of Economics & Political Science

With its sleek, sustainable design, the London School of
Economics' (LSE) New Academic Building is the perfect home
for a burgeoning management department and for Caneel Joyce,
PhD 09, whose passion for innovation led her here from her
native California last September.

"I wanted to be in a city where I'd have access to all sorts of creative
industries," explains Joyce, 31, who finished her dissertation,
on the effects of constraint on creativity, before she began teaching
at the LSE. "This is a very supportive environment—the LSE teaches
you how to teach—with an exciting, growing department."

Currently preparing several papers for publication, Joyce teaches
organizational behavior and change courses, summertime executive
education, and is building an experimental lab with colleague
Connson Locke, PhD 08. Before deciding to pursue a career in
academia, Joyce worked in marketing and advertising after graduating
from UCLA in communications.

"I was frustrated at not being able to make my ideas
go anywhere, plus the economy had tanked," says Joyce,
explaining her decision to leave advertising and marketing
and earn a PhD at Haas.

"I'd always been interested in creativity, but
it wasn't until my third year at Haas that I knew I
wanted to study how constraint affects decisions
made in the creative process, partly to help me understand
how to better manage my own ideas," she
continues. "Everything in my field felt really interesting
and important, so I needed to find some way to enjoy
eliminating some of my ideas and focusing on just a
few. My hunch was that there's got to be something
good about constraint that I wasn't seeing because
I hated constraining myself but recognized that I
needed to—I always want to pursue every idea."

In her extensive reading on psychology and organizational
behavior, Joyce found a paradox: too much choice can be bad for
decision-making, but people need freedom to be intrinsically motivated.
Her hypothesis, that a moderate level of constraint is best, was
validated by her six-month high-tech experiment involving 274 participants
at Haas, and by data she collected in Haas' new product
development class. Her findings have valuable applications for business.

"Many companies that want to make themselves creative take on
the 'anything goes!' freedom ethic, but they don't really know how to
live 'anything goes,'" Joyce says. "Creative industries value focus. If you
let people do anything, they'll do the safe thing. But if you tell them, 'generate
ideas about anything you want, within this box,' they explore that
box with greater depth and consider ideas that otherwise would appear
too strange at first glance."